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Ric Orlando, the sexy chef, stirs the senses

New World Bistro Bar chef and his food both have been known to elicit sighs

By Steve Barnes
| on February 12, 2014

Ric Orlando, executive chef at New World Bistro Bar, is considered the Capital Region's sexiest chef. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

Media: Times Union

The best food, the food we long for in the deepest well of our cravings, in that dark spot of gustatory lust we don't much talk about with others, touches all five of our senses.

Think of a lobe of sea urchin: Deep orange to the eye, the surface rough like velvet, a waft of iodine in the nose, slippery on the lips, brine and custard hitting the tongue, the auditory component just an appreciative whimper vibrating the roof of the mouth and into the nostrils.

Perhaps because taste and smell are rooted in some of the more primitive parts of our brain; we take it is a high compliment when someone is rendered momentarily inarticulate by a perfect bite. A cook, pro or home, would rather hear a groan of satisfaction from an eyes-closed diner than receive a multisyllabic paean.

Great food, like transcendent art, deranges us to some degree. This can be threatening to buttoned-up folks, the kind who won't let themselves dance with abandon or insist they would never, ever eat an entire lemon-meringue pie. And since we take in food through our mouths, that nexus of speech and song and sup and sex, eating can erase the boundaries between sensuous — that is, pleasing to the senses — and sensual, which has an erotic component. Touching a baby's skin is sensuous; the nape of your lover's neck, sensual; sliding a flap of luxuriously fatty tuna belly across your tongue, both.

Chef Ric Orlando knows this. He loves to chomp down on a Philly cheese steak, hear the crunch of the bread, feel the juice run across his fingers. For a number of years, as part of the Valentine's Day menu at his New World Home Cooking in Saugerties, Orlando has offered what he calls his "notorious safe sex platter" — 10 pairs of aphrodisiacal bites that diners are encouraged to feed one another, with the eater blindfolded and the feeder selecting the order of tastes from an array including raw oysters, avocado with goat cheese, chile-honey grapefruit and serrano chile peppers dipped in white chocolate.

"We really focus on simple, intense flavors in our Valentine's food," says Orlando. "When people go home after dinner, we want them to dance, not snore."

Customers in the Saugerties-Woodstock area love the safe-sex platter, relishing the permission to feed their blindfolded partner in public. Patrons at New World Bistro Bar in Albany, where Orlando is the chef and a partner, were less enthusiastic. Barely any ordered it, so it was offered only once. Another year, Orlando admits, he may have gone too far on the Valentine's menu, when he invoked cunnilingus with the name of a dish that featured beef tongue and octopus.

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More often, people think Orlando and his food are equally sexy. Aleph Ashline, a waiter who worked with Orlando at Justin's in Albany two decades ago and has been at New World Bistro since it opened in 2009, says Orlando has the appeal of a rock star among many customers.

Michelle Weiser was general manager, until last week, of the kitchen store Different Drummer's Kitchen in Stuyvesant Plaza, where Orlando taught dozens of cooking classes over the years. She says class participants, mostly female, often flirted outrageously with Orlando, and there was invariably a line afterward to engage him in chatty, innuendo-laden conversation.

"Once, there was a private event, a girls-night-out kind of class, and they flirted and flirted and just wouldn't leave him alone," says Weiser. "He was trying to get them to focus, and he got madder and madder. It was adorable."

The woman who knows Orlando best, his partner of 30 years and his wife of 29, Liz Corrado, says her husband's passionate nature has been one of his most appealing qualities throughout their relationship.

"He's a classic Italian: He loves art, he loves music, he loves to make love; he's a sensuous Renaissance man," says Corrado, who says her husband thrives on attention, and she doesn't mind in the least.

"The sex-symbol chef is the follow-up to the sex symbol musician he was when I married him. He's the improved version — this one cooks."